Live8

whether the whole process really needs to involve Robbie Williams. Or whether it wouldn’t benefit from the involvement of a few more Africans. African artists that is — although it seems they’ve been ghettoized to their own event.

K-Punk laments the death of punk rock brought on by the first Live Aid:

Live Aid was the anti-punk, its ideological blackmail requiring that we give up on aesthetics AND politics. If post-punk had demanded, and for a brief moment, had got, everything — sonic innovation and/as political insurgency — then Live Aid convinced us that in a state of emergency such excessive demands would have to be suspended.

Bob Geldof responds that at least he’s doing something, and that doing something is better than doing nothing.

No. It’s not. Not when your concert is designed to create awareness of something that the audience is already screamingly aware of, the poverty of many African societies, without trying to make them aware of what they don’t know: about how aid is dispersed, about the actual processes of globalization, about the specific humanity of specific African societies. Hell, anything beyond,“Africa’s really poor”. That’s the one thing the rest of the world already knows.